VMware’s Cloud Foundry turns to Jaspersoft for business analytics

Business Intelligence experts Jaspersoft continue open source drive – this time with their linkup with vibrant PaaS Cloud Foundry

It can’t have escaped your attention that cloud platforms are
currently jockeying for position by trying to acquire as many
capabilities as possible to entice new developers to their
offering. Consequently, almost daily partnerships are announced
detailing new integrations with the most popular PaaS options
around – OpenShift and CloudBees just to name two.

One such announcement this week from VMware’s Cloud Foundry
could however give them the edge. Business intelligence leader
Jaspersoft revealed that they were providing an open source version
of their flagship Jaspersoft BI Suite, pre-configured for
Cloud Foundry users, meaning a fully fleshed-out BI experience for
the users.

In greater detail, this will enable Cloud Foundry users to
gain native access to NoSQL database solution MongoDB, support for
Cassandra, as well as MySQL relational databases. All of this with
Big Data in mind of course.

Currently, Jaspersoft are recommending the locally-run
Micro Cloud Foundry as the best place to test their capabilities
and get optimal value, with Cloud Foundry being in beta.

We talked to Karl Van Der Bergh, Jaspersoft
Vice President of Product and Alliances about this outreach to the
Cloud Foundry community, which he was obviously excited about. He
first told us what Jaspersoft’s plans were for
PaaS:

We see Platform-as-a-Service as the platform as the future and
our strategy is to partner with the leading providers and become
the de-facto analytics service within PaaS. In the world of Big
Data-driven applications, business intelligence analytics are
extremely important.

Right now, it’s just a community server. It’s not about revenue
at the moment – it’s too early for that, it’s really about getting
developer mindshare.

This isn’t the first partnership unveiled by Jaspersoft,
previously announcing a partnership with Red Hat in January to be
part of OpenShift, and targetting two thriving cloud platform
communities first seems like a shrewd move to get everyone talking
about their integration.

Van Der Bergh added:

We’re still learning. It’s all about getting feedback from what
they (Cloud Foundry community) do and optimise their experience.
We’re alone for now, but we don’t expect to be alone for long
before other BI providers to realise potential and start
investing.

We decided to work with Cloud Foundry because of the big Java
links with the Spring community, and of course Red Hat with JBoss.
It’s just logical.

We applaud this too – recently there’s been a lot of talk of Big
Data analytics (notably in IBM’s acquistion of Vivisimo), and
leaving an indelible mark first is bound to count for something.
Jaspersoft are a pretty small company currently, and by nailing
these partnerships first, it could lead to greater things down the
line.

For a company supposedly
jabbing at other open source initiatives, VMware appear to be
keeping tabs on upcoming open source, especially where in-beta
Cloud Foundry is concerned – it’s pretty much the only way to
generate a large enough following behind the product.

Jaspersoft’s business model puts them in good position when
competing against other BI vendors – they’ve got a strong PaaS
background by understand developers and the latest technologies
that are becoming ever more important, and they’ve jumped in first.
Not to mention their Big Data Index, which gives them the edge in
that department as well. We think that their native MongoDB
connector could be pivotal too – other BI vendors have to go
through a longer process to utilise the popular NoSQL solution.

Van Der Bergh also noted that Jaspersoft had been active in
showcasing their technologies, hosting community events in the US
and Europe to educate the likes of VMware.

We’re excited to see what other Jaspersoft features will be
released into the Cloud Foundry community after the initial core
offering. For more information on Jaspersoft’s new BI for
PaaS offering, please visit their site and
view the Jaspersoft/VMware
webinar as well. Like what you see? Venture over to JasperForge
to download.